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Castrol Joins The Bloodhound Project

The BLOODHOUND Project is proud to announce a new partnership with Castrol, one of the world’s leading lubricant brands, who will provide high performance lubricants, brake and hydraulic fluids for use in the BLOODHOUND Supersonic Car – the 1,609kmh Land Speed racing car now being constructed in Bristol, UK.

Castrol has always been synonymous with pioneering achievements, passion and performance and has been integral to some of the greatest performances on earth. The company has a notable heritage in Land Speed Racing, the original, purest and fastest form of automotive competition.The land speed record has been broken 21 times with Castrol as a partner, from Sir Malcolm Campbell’s first record attempt in 1924 (235kmh) to a 30-year history of supporting the Thrust campaigns.
Thrust successfully raised the Land Speed Record first to 1,019 kmh with Richard Noble’s Thrust 2, and then to 1,228kmh with Andy Green at the helm of Thrust SSC in 1997. This record still stands today and will be the first target for BLOODHOUND SSC when it arrives in Hakskeen Pan, South Africa in 2015.
Paul Waterman, Global Chief Executive of Castrol said,“We are delighted to support the Bloodhound project. At Castrol, we have a proud history of fuelling pioneers and this partnership gives us the chance to showcase how our high performance products set new standards and push boundaries.”

8 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE BLOODHOUND PROJECT

1. The world land speed record of 1227.9 kmh is held by Thrust SSC, a UK team lead by BLOODHOUND’s Project Director Richard Noble and driven by Andy Green.
2. The BLOODHOUND team scoured the globe to find the perfect desert to run the car on, it needed to be at least 19 km long, three miles wide and perfectly flat. The Hakskeen Pan, Northern Cape, South Africa was selected.
3. At full speed BLOODHOUND SSC will cover 1.6 km in 3.6 seconds, that’s 4.5 football pitches laid end-to-end per second.
4. BLOODHOUND has three power plants, a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet from a Eurofighter Typhoon, a cluster of NAMMO hybrid rockets and a 750bhp racecar engine that drives the rocket oxidiser pump. Between them they generate 135,000 equivalent hp, equal to 180 F1 cars.
5. BLOODHOUND SSC is currently being assembled at the BLOODHOUND Technical Centre in Bristol. It is on schedule for roll-out summer 2015 where it will undergo UK runway testing up to 321 kmh at the Aerohub, Newquay. The Team will then deploy to South Africa to begin high speed testing with the target of reaching 1,287 kmh. The Team will return to the UK to review the data and return to South Africa in 2016 with the aim of reaching 1,609 kmh.
6. Over 250 UK companies, 180 of them SMEs, are involved in the Project, which has become a showcase for science and engineering capability.
7. Over 5,500 UK primary and secondary schools have signed up to use the free BLOODHOUND Education resources in their classrooms.
8. The educational outreach programme also runs in South Africa with more than 200 schools already participating and more than 100 BLOODHOUND Ambassadors signed up to help use the project to inspire young people about studying maths and science. The programme reaches out to schools across the country, but particularly in the Northern Cape Province, home to the track where the BLOODHOUND SSC will run.